A switch appliance connected between two communicating network nodes may include a switch for forwarding packets to an inline tool. The switch appliance may also include a bypass component to bypass the switch in certain situation. For example, if the switch appliance lost power, then the switch may not be able to forward packets to the inline tool. In such situation, the bypass component may provide a physical bridge to transmit the packets from a transmitting node to a receiving node, without passing the packets to the switch for forwarding to the inline tool. However, in such solution, the packets would not be able to be processed by the inline tool.